Lakshmi Valsalakumari is an IT professional who wants to expand her horizons. She attended the recent Wikimedia Developers Camp in Bangalore and had this story to tell:

Lakshmi with Santhosh Thottingal, the lead developer of Wikimedia’s font and keyboard tools

I have been an Information Technology professional working with well-known software organizations over the last 15 years. While IT has been keeping me busy, productive and happy, I have also all along harbored an interest in history and the humanities. I have recently decided to pursue these interests full-time, joining a research program at the Centre of Exact Humanities, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India.

With my recent shift into academics and research, I have been referencing Wikipedia quite a bit in the last two to three months, and I have been amazed at the sheer magnitude of information found on it. While I have been reading the Wikipedia pages extensively, I had never yet considered editing it, not even in English, the language I reference Wikipedia most in, and the one I use most on computers.

Editing and contributing content in Malayalam, my mother tongue, had not really occurred to me either—Malayalam being a language I hardly used on my computers—until I attended the Bangalore Wikimedia Dev Camp.

I have tried typing Malayalam using my regular browser, but I have not been very happy with the effect. This was not the way I liked to see Malayalam written and rendered, so I had not made any further efforts to write Malayalam online. At the camp, I met Santhosh and Manoj—avid Malayalam Wikipedia contributors—and they persuaded me to give it another shot.

The first step was to download the Meera Unicode font for Malayalam, then to change my default browser to one of those that can render Meera well (I tried out Google Chrome; Firefox was even better, I was told), and then to try out typing Malayalam using the regular English keyboard.

I liked what I saw. When I typed the suggested key combinations, even complicated Malayalam letter combinations were being rendered the way I would have written them using pen and paper. I tried more and more combinations—ta, tha, tta, Ta, tma, thra, tya, zha—and was pleased with the effect. This was fun!

Demos of how transliteration keyboards for Malayalam work

Soon, I was creating my first article. I noticed that on the main Wikipedia page, an article on Barcelona mentioned Catalonia as a red link, meaning that no further information was available in the Malayalam Wikipedia on it, whereas there was plenty of information on the same subject in the English Wikipedia. Manoj guided me through the steps as I created my first page in the Malayalam Wikipedia, copied the template information over from the English article and saved the heading, trying to get it right in Malayalam. I viewed my saved efforts, and with a sense of achievement, I went to grab a coffee.

Back online with my coffee, I was surprised to find a message on the article Talk page—someone had already posted a comment on the page I had just saved, chiding me for the lack of content and references. “This will drive away people from Wikipedia,” the post read. “Please ensure I get enough content on the page!”

Man, that was fast! I had no idea people were watching and following Wikipedia edits this closely. Manoj encouraged me to type more, so I returned to my effort. While I was getting comfortable with the typing, I was still grappling for suitable words in Malayalam for the content I was reading in English. Manoj suggested Olam, an online dictionary, and sure enough, I was able to find several of the Malayalam equivalents I was searching for.

And so, I typed on. Again, to my surprise, I found people editing the content and giving helpful suggestions even as I was still typing—one person told me to leave native names as such and not translate those, and another formatted some of the changes. By the end of the day, I had posted a decent amount of info, although there remained much more to be added.

I was happy with my day’s work. I had never imagined that using Malayalam on my computer and editing the Malyalam Wikipedia content would be such a pleasant and enjoyable experience, one that I was actually looking forward to!

Another point I must mention here is the sheer volume of Malayalam content that I have started seeing online, on Wikipedia pages and elsewhere. This must be due to the attention paid to this field of languages, literature and culture online by movements like Wikimedia. In 2005, I remember searching online for a well-known Malayalam lullaby Omanathingalkkidavo by Irayimman Thampi, but could not find anything. I had then resorted to the memories of my immediate relatives to try and pen the forgotten lyrics. Now, when I search for the same, the amount of material that comes up on that lullaby is amazing!

My heart-felt appreciation to Wikipedia and all its online community members who have made all of this possible. I hope to be part of this movement myself and do my bit toward furthering easy availability of multi-lingual content online

Lakshmi Valsalakumari

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team is developing technologies that make it possible to speakers of all languages to contribute to Wikipedia in their language as easily and naturally as possible. Lakshmi’s story is an example of how these technologies enable people to develop reference and educational content that makes Wikipedia useful to people in the whole world. These technologies are deployed in Wikipedias in most languages of India, and more languages and projects are being added all the time.

Amir E. Aharoni, Software Engineer (Internationalization)

Later today, Wikimedia’s newly established Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) will be publishing its first-ever recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees about how to distribute money to organizations in the Wikimedia movement. This is an important step for the movement, marking a significant devolution of power to the global volunteer community of Wikimedians, in which the FDC will give away as much as $11.2 million in 2012-13. We wanted to take a moment today to reflect on why the Board chose to create the FDC, and what has happened over the past seven and a half months since we made that decision.

First, a little background. The goal of the FDC is to help the Board make decisions about how to effectively allocate movement funds to achieve Wikimedia’s mission, vision, and strategy. Last March in Berlin, we called for its creation.

We did it because we believe that a global body of committed, experienced Wikimedians, supported by a well-designed process and a dedicated staff, will be perceived by the Wikimedia community as fair, transparent and accountable, and will be able to make decisions about where the Wikimedia movement should spend its money to accomplish three important goals:

• Ensure the money is put towards activities aligned with the Wikimedia movement’s strategic objectives;
• Ensure the money is spent effectively, supporting greater impact and enabling us to make faster progress towards our goals;
• Gather and publish information that helps anyone interested to get smarter faster about which programmatic activities are effective, and why.

The FDC process was set into motion following a Board resolution in March 2012, which said that going forward “all funds raised via the Wikimedia project sites will be distributed via the recommendations of the FDC, with the exception of Wikimedia Foundation core operating costs and the operating reserve.”

After an invitation to serve on the inaugural FDC was posted on all the Wikimedia projects, 43 people self-nominated to serve on the inaugural FDC, and of those, the Board selected seven.

They are from seven different countries, and have worked on Wikipedia, Commons, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Meta-Wiki. They are or have been editors, patrollers, bureaucrats, administrators, stewards, strategy project contributors, and members of the Ombudsman Commission, the English Wikipedia ArbCom, the Funds Dissemination Advisory Group, the Chapters committee, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Audit committee and the Grant Advisory committee. They have also founded or have been Board members of five chapters: Bangladesh, India, Sweden, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. Among them all, they speak 13 languages. They were chosen for their experience within and outside of the Wikimedia movement, including familiarity with grantmaking, finance and project management. Both of us (Jan-Bart and Patricio) sat on the committee as non-voting observers on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.

Since the launch of the FDC, they’ve had weekly orientation meetings and continuous communication via Skype, IRC and mailing lists, leading to the committee’s first in-person meeting at the end of October.

On August 1st, a public FDC wiki page was established, upon which fund-seeking Wikimedia organizations were invited to submit their first proposals in public and on the wiki. On October 1 the Wikimedia Foundation and eleven Wikimedia chapters submitted twelve proposals for the first round of funding.

The process allowed everyone in the community the chance to examine and comment on the proposals, alongside the assessments by the FDC supporting staff at WMF and according to pre-defined, public criteria that are the same for each applying organization (the community-written newsletter “Wikipedia Signpost” summarized the criteria and resulting assessments in an overview article).

Why is this important? Because it’s a lot of money. In this fiscal year, the FDC will make recommendations for how to give out as much as $11.2 million. To give that responsibility to a volunteer-driven body is a major step towards increased transparency, accountability, fairness and open collaboration in the Wikimedia movement.

We’d like to thank the people who have spent so much time making this whole process possible: the Wikimedia Foundation staff members who have been supporting the process, and the FDC members themselves. We believe this process shows great promise thus far, and we are excited to be getting the FDC’s recommendations later today.

If you have questions or wish to share feedback, you can do so on the FDC portal. We encourage you to read more about the process, and to get involved with it. All the proposals are open to your questions and feedback: we would welcome your contributions.

Jan-Bart de Vreede, Vice Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees,
Patricio Lorente, Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

Participants at the recent Wikipedia edit-a-thon at the Smithsonian

(This is a guest post from Sara Snyder, the webmaster at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.)

Librarians and archivists in the United States have been, and will continue to be, mostly female. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 81 percent of current students pursuing a Masters in Library and Information Science (MLS) degree are women. As of 2011, women accounted for 83 percent of all librarians in the U.S. Archivists—a closely related profession, which also frequently requires an MLS degree—are also female. As of 2004, 64 percent of archivists were women.

Wikipedia editors have been, and will continue to be, mostly male. The Wikimedia Foundation’s 2011 editor survey reported that 92 percent of Wikipedia editors are male. Though important work is being done to try and close the gender gap, the disparity will likely continue to be pretty significant in the immediate future.

Yet—other than gender—librarians and archivists and Wikipedia contributors share much in common. Both groups are motivated by a deep desire to share knowledge with the world, to the point that they have committed their free time to working on the encyclopedia, or have chosen to focus professionally on helping researchers. Both groups have a strong understanding of how to conduct research and how to evaluate and cite authoritative sources. Both frequently have technical expertise with markup languages, metadata standards and information design. But most of all, both groups tend to hold strong beliefs that all people have a right to accurate, unbiased, high quality information, free from barriers and paywalls.

Phoebe Ayers, one of Wikipedia’s best-known and most eloquent advocates, is an academic librarian by profession. In her essay “Why Work on Wikipedia?” she describes the connection between her profession and her contributions to Wikipedia:

For me, the answer is a matter of scale. As a librarian, I am in the business of helping make sure that people get the information that they are looking for in order to do their jobs, educate themselves, satisfy their curiosity and live a fulfilling life…. [Wikipedia] is also working towards these goals, but on a global, multilingual and hitherto unprecedented scale…. It’s a simple matter of efficiency—I work on Wikipedia, and try to make it better, in order to reach as many people as possible.

This desire to maximize the impact of her work as an information professional is one that many of Ayers’ professional colleagues probably identify with. However, many librarians and archivists may not yet realize that the Wikipedia community welcomes and values their contributions.

A backstage pass tour was also a part of the edit-a-thon event

Given the demographics and goals of workers in these professions, recruiting a greater numbers of librarians and archivists to contribute to Wikipedia is a smart strategy to help close the gender gap on Wikipedia. I have some additional, anecdotal evidence for the wisdom of this strategy: me. I am an archivist by training, and if it weren’t for outreach on the part of Wikipedians allied with the GLAM-Wiki project, I would not be writing this blog entry. Even though I created my first Wikipedia article over six years ago, I only began to contribute to Wikipedia on a regular basis after two very talented Wikimedians–Katie Filbert and Sarah Stierch–reached out to me and my Smithsonian colleagues in the spring of 2011. They worked to demystify the platform and the community, and explained how institutions like the Smithsonian could partner with Wikipedia in a relationship of mutual benefit. Their efforts led to the ongoing Smithsonian GLAM-Wiki Partnership, which at this point has yielded two Wikipedian-in-Residencies, hundreds of edits and Commons contributions, five Smithsonian-hosted edit-a-thon outreach events and myriad new and recommitted Wikipedia editors.

Two years later, Smithsonian librarians and archivists are the ones demystifying Wikipedia and promoting its ideals of openness and the free sharing of knowledge to our colleagues and to the public. On October 12, 2012 the Smithsonian Libraries and Wikimedia DC jointly sponsored “Wikipedia Loves Libraries: Backstage at the Smithsonian Libraries,” which took place in the main library in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. It was our largest edit-a-thon at the Smithsonian to date. The results of the day included a Wikipedia training session for over 40 staff members and volunteers and at least seven new user accounts registered. But the best part of the event for me was looking around the room and not seeing “92 percent this” or “84 percent that.” The room was filled with people of diverse genders, ages, and backgrounds, united in their enthusiasm for learning new skills and for sharing what they know with new audiences around the globe.

That is the Wikipedia community that I am proud to be a part of.

Sara Snyder (User:Sarasays)

(You can read more about the recent Smithsonian edit-a-thon: [http://blog.library.si.edu/2012/10/editing-wikipedia-better-with-friends-and-best-with-librarians/ Editing Wikipedia: Better with friends, and best with librarians!” also by Sara Snyder)

A new video player has been enabled on Wikipedia and its sister sites, and it comes with the promise of bringing free educational videos to more people, on more devices, in more languages.

The player is the same HTML5 player used in the Kaltura open-source video platform. It has been integrated with MediaWiki (the software that runs Wikimedia sites like Wikipedia) through an extension called TimedMediaHandler. It replaces an older Ogg-only player that has been in use since 2007.

The new player supports closed captions in multiple languages.

Based on HTML5, the new player plays audio and video files on wiki pages. It brings many new features, like advanced support for closed captions and other timed text. By allowing contributors to transcribe videos, the new player is a significant step towards accessibility for hearing-impaired Wikipedia readers. Captions can easily be translated into many languages, thus expanding their potential audience.

TimedMediaHandler also comes with other useful features, like support for the royalty-free WebM video format. Support for WebM makes it possible to seamlessly import videos encoded to that format, such as freely-licensed content from YouTube’s massive library.

Even further behind the scenes, TimedMediaHandler adds support for server-side transcoding, i.e. the ability to convert from one video format to another, in order to deliver the appropriate video stream to the user depending on their bandwidth and the size of the player. For example, support for mobile formats is available, although it is not currently enabled.

Sponsored by Kaltura and Google, developers Michael Dale and Jan Gerber are the main architects of the successful launch of the new player. With the support of the Wikimedia Foundation’s engineering team and Kaltura, they have gone through numerous cycles of development, review and testing to finally release the fruits of years of work.

Efforts to better integrate video content to Wikipedia and its sister sites date back to early 2008, when Kaltura and the Wikimedia Foundation announced their first collaborative video experiment. Since then, incremental improvements have been released, but the deployment of TimedMediaHandler is the most significant achievement to date. (more…)

Merrilee wants YOU to work with your local libraries to improve Wikipedia!

Last year marked the start of Wikipedia Loves Libraries (WLL), and in 2012, WLL activities are in full swing, with many events planned in the coming month. WLL was originally conceived as a way of celebrating Open Access Week, but we now have WLL events throughout the year. As a librarian who is interested in seeing more coordination between libraries and other cultural heritage organizations (i.e. GLAM), I’d like to offer some perspectives on why libraries and Wikipedia are so well aligned with one another.

The bottom line is that we share a common mission. We are dedicated to providing free access to information and knowledge. Wikipedians want to strengthen their articles by citing credible sources. If those sources are in print, or hidden behind paywalls, it undermines the important tenant of free access.

Libraries collect those same credible sources and make them freely available to patrons. Partnering with libraries helps keep sources free. Librarians value “information literacy,” which means teaching the general public to recognize, appreciate and rely on credible sources. Sound familiar? Teaching basic Wikipedia editing skills can be a great, practical way to re-enforce information literacy skills.

Encouraging more librarians to become Wikipedians will also help address the gender gap. Librarians are an almost mirror image of Wikipedians in terms of gender – a March 2012 survey of members of the American Library Association found that 80.7 percent of those in the profession are female (versus about 10 percent of Wikipedians).

So, if you haven’t already, reach out to your local librarian. Suggest a WLL event, or find out if you can use library space to hold an editathon on a topic of local interest. Ask for help from your library in promoting events, not only to library patrons, but also to staff. Be patient, and recognize that librarians may move at a slower pace than Wikipedians (and that they have a range of other events and activities on top of their day-to-day duties). Be complementary to see if you can find a way for Wikipedia activities to harmonize with areas where the library is already investing. If you make the effort, I think you’ll have a good shot at creating a beautiful partnership, and creating some new Wikipedians in the process.

-Merrilee Proffitt, Senior Program Officer, OCLC Research (User:Mlet)

WikiWomen Day participants

Sunday, 28th October 2012, was “WikiWomen Day” in Pune, India. The day brought together women from a variety of educational backgrounds, castes, creeds, religions, and age groups. The purpose of the gathering was to both educate women about the huge gender gap that exists within Wikipedia and to encourage women to contribute.

The workshop was held by “Wikipedia Club Pune” in PAI International Learning Solutions, Azam Campus, Pune, India. The workshop began at 10:00am with approximately 25 attendees. The first session explained the issues surrounding the lack of women editors. This session was an eye-opener for attendees about the huge gender gap within Wikipedia. Next, we offered a “How to get Hands-on on Wikipedia” program. The majority of attendees didn’t know how to edit Wikipedia, therefore, they had to start from scratch with tasks such as creating a username, and learning about Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and its principles, such as the Five Pillars. After a thorough review, we presented the basics of editing.

Later in the afternoon, there was a breakout session where everyone got an opportunity to interact with one another while enjoying a lunch of burgers and soft drinks. Following that, there was Indic language session where attendees were introduced to the multi-lingual aspects of Wikipedia. After that was the “Collaborative Contribution” session where we put our newly acquired skills to work. In this session, we expanded the “Helen Keller” article in Marathi. This page was originally started by an anonymous editor with a single line of text. Within a half hour, the entire page was developed, telling a comprehensive story of her life. This collaborative experience was marvelous and my favorite session of the day. After this session, we distributed participation certificates to everyone and encouraged our motivated attendees to continue editing Wikipedia.

Last but not the least, the workshop ended with the cake-cutting ceremony, which was also the launch for “Wikipedia Summit India 2013,” to be held in January. The Summit will focus on Wikipedia’s gender gap and provide action-oriented workshops focused on closing the gap.

-Ketaki Pole (User:Ketaki Pole)

Vol: 2 • Issue: 10 • October 2012 [archives]

WP governance informal; community as social network; efficiency of recruitment and content production; Rorschach news

With contributions by: Piotrus, Adler.fa, Bdamokos, Ragesoss, Tbayer, and Phoebe

Wikipedia governance found to be mostly informal

A paper in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, coming from the social control perspective and employing the repertory grid technique, has contributed interesting observations about the governance of Wikipedia.^[1] The paper begins with a helpful if cursory overview of governance theories, moving towards the governance of open source communities and Wikipedia. That cursory treatment is not foolproof, though: for example, the authors mention “bazaar style governance”, but attribute it incorrectly—rather than the 2006 work they cite, the coining of this term dates to Eric S. Raymond‘s 1999 The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The authors have interviewed a number of Wikipedians and identified a number of formal and informal governance mechanisms. Only one formal mechanism was found important—the policies—while seven informal mechanisms were deemed important: collaboration among users, discussions on article talk pages, facilitation by experienced users, individuals acting as guardians of the articles, inviting individuals to participate, large numbers of editors, and participation by highly reputable users. Notably, the interviewed editors did not view elements such as administrator involvement, mediation or voting as important.

The paper concludes that “in the everyday practice of content creation, the informal mechanisms appear to be significantly more important than the formal mechanisms”, and note that this likely means that the formal mechanisms are used much more sparingly than informal ones, most likely only in the small percentage of cases where the informal mechanisms fail to provide an agreeable solution for all the parties. It was stressed that not all editors are equal, and certain editors (and groups) have much more power than others, a fact that is quickly recognized by all editors. The authors note the importance of transparent interactions in spaces like talk pages, and note that “the reported use of interaction channels outside the Wikipedia platform (e.g., e-mail) is a cause for concern, as these channels limit involvement and reduce transparency.” Citing Ostrom’s governance principles, they note that “ensuring participation and transparency is crucial for maintaining the stability of self-governing communities.”

Social network analysis of Wikipedia community

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You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations.

Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for September 2012, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Highlights

The Curation Toolbar, here being used to mark a new article as reviewed and send its author a message

“Page Curation” tools make it easier to review new Wikipedia articles

Every day, thousands of new pages are created on Wikipedia, requiring hundreds of volunteer editors to check them for quality. To make their work easier, the Editor Engagement Team has developed the “Page Curation” feature. It includes two tools:

• The New Pages Feed, an overview of new pages, annotated with information that helps reviewing them
• The Curation Toolbar appears next to a new page, offering autoconfirmed editors easy access to various actions, e.g. to mark the new page as reviewed, tag it for quality problems, or nominate it for deletion.

Page Curation was deployed on the English Wikipedia on September 20, and is planned to become available on other projects as well.

Many new Wikipedia editors experience frustration when they start an article that does not meet community expectations and gets deleted. It is hoped that the Page Curation feature will also lead to better feedback for page creators.

New volunteer-based model for distributing donation money launched

Over the last half year, a new model has been established for distributing the donation money raised via Wikimedia project sites. More than $10 million of it will now be allocated based on the recommendations of the new Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC), which consists entirely of volunteers.

Following a public nomination process, the seven voting members of the first FDC have been announced: Arjuna Rao Chavala (India), Dariusz Jemielniak (Poland), Ali Haidar Khan (Bangladesh), Mike Peel (United Kingdom), Yuri Perohanych (Ukraine), Sydney Poore (United States), and Anders Wennersten (Sweden). They are joined by Jan-Bart de Vreede (Netherlands) and Patricio Lorente (Argentina) as non-voting representatives of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Susana Moraes (Portugal) was appointed as ombudsperson for the FDC process.

The FDC is now reviewing funding requests by 12 organizations, which are open for public comment until October 22.

New travel project site, and legal activities

The Wikimedia Foundation has agreed to host a new travel project site at the request of the Wikimedia community. Unfortunately, on August 29, 2012, Internet Brands, the owner of the Wikitravel website, sued two Wikitravel volunteers, alleging various legal claims. In response, one of the volunteers filed an anti-SLAPP motion, arguing that Internet Brands’s lawsuit sought to suppress his right to discuss the new Wikimedia travel project. The Wikimedia Foundation has also filed a suit against Internet Brands, claiming that it has no right to impede the creation of the new travel project.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for August:

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You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations of the “Highlights” excerpts.

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of September (October 4, 2012)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for August:

456.25 million (+0.98% compared with July; +7.92% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release September data later in October)

Page requests for September:

19.1 billion (+5.3% compared with August; +20.9% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for August 2012 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

79,572 (-0.74% compared with July / -0.81% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects. Note: We recently refined this metric to take into account Wikimedia Commons and activity across several projects.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for August 2012:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of August 31, 2012

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of August 31, 2012

(Financial information is only available for August 2012 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the period July 1, 2012 – August 31, 2012.

• Revenue for the month of August is $1.4MM vs plan of $465K, approximately $946K or 203% over plan, primarily due to the $1.0MM received from the Sloan Foundation.
• Year-to-date revenue is $1.8MM vs plan of $1.9MM, approximately $0.1MM or 9% under plan.
• Expenses for the month of August is $2.6MM vs plan of $2.7MM, approximately $0.1MM or 3% under plan, primarily due personnel expenses, internet hosting expenses, travel expenses, capital expenses, and legal expenses partially offset by a grant for the India catalyst program and higher recruiting expenses.
• Year-to-date expenses is $5.2MM vs plan of $5.9MM, approximately $0.7MM or 12% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, internet hosting, travel expenses, capital expenses, legal expenses.
• Cash position is $21.8MM as of August 31, 2012 which is approximately 6.2 months of expenses.

Highlights

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Students regularly use Wikipedia, and so do teachers. Whether we’re looking for information related to a class project, seeking an illustration for a paper, or reading background material so we can better understand an assigned text, free knowledge shared digitally is now a major component of education. Because Wikipedia is such a ubiquitous and influential source of information for my students, I feel quite annoyed when I find gaps in coverage and participation.

Alverno College students use Wikipedia to share information about Milwaukee public art.

Missing information is what initially motivated me to become an editor. I wanted my students to be able to find information easily about public art, about the monuments and sculptures they walk past everyday on campus, in city parks and in their home towns. After writing a few short articles about sculptures I knew well, I realized that trying to fill the gaps myself would be a long, lonely process. Then I realized that my students could help.

Since 2008, I have used Wikipedia regularly in my courses. Working in collaboration with editors involved with WikiProject Public Art and WikiProject Lights Camera Wiki, my students and I have developed hundreds of Wikipedia articles about public artworks, and we’ve created and contributed more than 50 short videos through Wikimedia Commons to illustrate article content.

My deepening involvement with Wikipedia as a movement put me in touch with another gap: gender. Fortunately, my students also help with that. I’ve now introduced close to 100 students to editing Wikipedia, and all of them are women. (One of my students was even previously featured on this blog!)

My students are not typical Wikipedia editors–and not just because of their gender. Many are working women who have returned to school after starting families and careers. Many are graduates of under-funded public school districts that lag in access to digital technology. Many do not have their own computers and rely instead on smartphones and campus labs. While all are familiar with what Wikipedia is, none of them has prior experience editing it, and few have participated in online communities beyond Facebook.

Getting students started editing Wikipedia is easy, but keeping those students connected to the open knowledge movement as active contributors is more challenging. To participate consistently, students need motivation, opportunity and encouragement. For an initial editing experience, a class project provides the motivation of a focus and deadline, a computer lab offers the opportunity of access and the close-knit community of a classroom provides the structure and encouragement.

Alverno College, where I teach now, contributes a unique support in the form of its innovative ability-based curriculum. At Alverno, students work to develop eight core abilities, including the problem solving skills they need to navigate new technologies and the habits of effective citizenship they need to engage in the “good faith collaboration” that Wikipedia’s norms require. Beyond my classroom at Alverno, students receive support through initiatives like the Wikipedia Education Program, Campus Ambassadors, and the Wikipedia Teahouse.

A few of the women who learned to edit in my classes are barnstar rock stars and I like to think that many more are getting ready to shine. Today, I’m motivated to teach with Wikipedia because I want to learn how to better support women to share their expertise and build community around their intellectual interests. I’m grateful to the organizers of the WikiWomen’s Collaborative for bringing needed attention and resources to the vexing problem of gender inequity among editors. I’m optimistic that this effort will bring me in contact with models to inspire my students to continue editing and fill the gaps. Keeping women active as editors is one important way to create a more welcoming environment within the movement.

Jennifer Geigel Mikulay, Alverno College, Milwaukee